Rather than being carried to Heaven in an instant, the crippled vessel kept sailing upward for another three miles before its momentum gave out, then plunged 12 miles to the ocean. The crew was, in all likelihood, conscious for the full two and a half minutes until it hit the water.

Yeah, I remember reading that a long time ago. Pretty terrible to think about.

There's a lot of dip horsefeathers in that link railing about "government transparency" and how not releasing the info amounts to some kind of ridiculous cover up that cost lives. No, NASA's approach to the O-rings and how people tried to cover THAT up cost lives; the idea that they could or should have had some kind of ejection system on the space shuttle is asinine. You'd make something that dangerous even more dangerous by compromising the structural integrity needed to maintain an ejection/parachute system, plus nevermind that such a system would likely be destroyed or damaged in any situation catastrophic enough to require it in the first place.

Buried in the comments section of an io9 article about the Apollo 1 tragedy was a guy sharing pictures that his grandfather (who worked on the Apollo flight sim team) gave him:

Pretty cool how they used actual models to simulate what the view would look like for the astronauts. And I love how in the last one they could be standing in front of state of the art computers or vending machines.